Then there's the Nesting Phase, which other guides call Maturity. This is where the community asks itself questions about what it wants to be, figures out what's healthy for it, and tidies up its house.

OR, it can be the Cliquey Fragmentation Phase, or the Mod Paranoia phase, or the Some People Have Been Here Too Long phase.

Remember: people aren't supposed to stay on one website their whole lives. People aren't designed for that, and websites aren't designed for that.

The "decline" phase can be the tragic Heartbreak Phase, with a bunch of people arguing about The Future Of The Site and about why people left (an irresolvable question that can suck in a community until it collapses on itself like a black hole) and frantically trying to renew and change itself until even the old guard are scared off, or it can be the Cosiness Phase.

In Cosy Mode, everyone who wasn't right for the site has moved on, and the folks left are the ones who love it.

During Cosy Mode, you scale back advertising until you're no longer trying to grow the site, but just keep it in general maintenance. You fix long-standing UI annoyances and make small quality-of-life improvements. Avoid making big interface changes.

After a few years, say for a big anniversary, you might send out an email to the old guard saying hey here's what's changed, but be careful as a lot of the old guard might have moved on because they no longer fit the culture of the site.

Cosy Mode is the longest phase, and it's pretty lovely. There are no more existential crises and the community has pretty much met its equilibrium.

Heartbreak Mode can also drag on for years, becoming more and more tragic every day as members run around with their hair on fire trying to answer why people left (for 99% of former members, they left because it's a website - but one or two will come back to say This Is Why I Left and they'll be taken as representative samples).

The big difference between Cosy Mode and Heartbreak Mode is that the people in Cosy Mode like being in Cosy Mode, and the people in Heartbreak Mode hate being in Heartbreak Mode but do it anyway.

People go into Heartbreak Mode because they think that a website has to grow forever, and this is madness. If a website carried on growing forever, then eventually everyone on the planet would be on that website all the time.

A thing that constantly grows until there's nothing outside of it isn't a community, it's a cancer.

Anyway whether you're in Cosy Mode or Heartbreak Mode pretty much comes down to how well you've handled the phases beforehand, and I'll reiterate: REMOVE THE PEOPLE ON YOUR WEBSITE WHO DON'T WANT TO BE ON YOUR WEBSITE BUT CANNOT HELP THEMSELVES. They will put you into Heartbreak Mode every damn time.

Heartbreak Mode is also characterized by paranoia about moderator interactions, which is why it's seriously important to ban people who lie about the mods, permanently, without warning.

I know, I know, it looks authoritarian and tyranty and all those bad things, and it can be tempting to let people run around saying "So-and-so was banned because the mods don't like them!" when they were actually banned for being a pedo and just kinda trust that the truth will out, but it won't.

Another thing about community management, which came up in this very thread: I really wanna re-emphasize the whole "Let people delete their past selves" thing.

Everyone, without exception, says stupid things online. Everyone, with very few exceptions, reflects on the stupid things they said once upon a time, and cringes. The only people who don't are people who don't grow, change, and learn.

Back to banning folks for a second, folks who lie about the mods or folks who don't want to be on the site but won't leave - banning folks feels bad.

It feels bad because you think about how you'd feel if you got banned, or it feels bad because you might feel like you've failed to change someone's mind, or it feels bad because sometimes this person can be charming or funny (abusers always are), or it feels bad because you feel like you're betraying some principle of freedom or whatever.

Being a community admin isn't easy. You'll feel bad sometimes. It feels much easier, at least in the short term, to let trolls and arseholes and people who are making themselves miserable just kinda stick around, and hope they'll leave.

You've pretty much got to deal with occasionally feeling awful. If it helps, remember this: although to you, handing down a ban can feel like giving a death sentence, to the person you're banning, it just means they'll have to look at a different website.

Back to talking about the growth phase of online community development, the Excitement Phase where you're watching your numbers suddenly go up.

This is where you find out that the things that you didn't bother writing down because Everybody Knows are not actually the things that Everybody Knows.

I'll take an example from my game, which is a multiplayer text adventure. This really happened.

One day, you've got a few hundred active users and Everybody Knows that there's a fountain in the centre of town. You didn't write the fountain, it's a thing that players decided was there and started to roleplay around and they talk to each other and Everybody Knows about the fountain.

The following day you get linked from somewhere big and you've suddenly got two thousand people on the site.

Now, there's no fountain for a while. Because you didn't write it down in an FAQ, and the people that figured Everybody Knows about it are now outnumbered by the people who don't.

This is an example from game fiction, but the same happens for community norms. Hell look what happens here whenever Twitter does something stupid. Everybody Knows we don't do screenshot dunking for clout chasing here, until a few thousand people pile in and suddenly we don't.

If Everybody Knows, then WRITE IT DOWN!

Keep an eye on veteran users who are very quick to welcome newbies.

Keep two eyes on them if they don't interact much with other veterans.

If you see them invite newbies to a Discord or some other off-site comms where you can't keep an eye on them, get out the bloody microscope and cast out your feelers along the whisper networks, 'cause you might well be dealing with an unreported creep.

(don't let the community members know you're sniffing around the welcome wagon. Genuine friendly welcome wagons are an unambiguous good, don't jeopardize them by making them feel self-conscious or suspected of foul play.

Hey, I never said this was easy. It's a balancing act.)

A big problem with online communities is they tend to be put together by techy computery programmy logical people, and folks like that tend to assume that people behave rationally, that the things people do make sense, that there's some sort of order behind people's behaviour.

There bloody isn't. People torture themselves for no reason at all, and make you watch. Every five minutes some techy person starts an online community and is shocked, SHOCKED, to find that people are basically bonkers.

Anyway these computery programmery types reckon hey I'll whack together some cool new social tech and I can just spend all my time coding to make it better and people will be happy.

Bollocks. If I spend 20% of the time I devote to my game actually writing the game, then that's a code-heavy week. Programming is not what you need to be good at, to do this kind of thing.

People isn't even what you have to be good at, it's not enough to be a very social person, because people act really differently online than they do IRL.

Being Very Online isn't even what you need to be good at, because that only gives you an end-user's perspective, which is useful sometimes but way less often than you think.

Really the only thing that can make you good at admin'ing an online community is doing it for a long time and talking to other admins.

Hey, sorry if you wanted some kinda Ten Neat Tricks thing.

It's very hard, often painful, you're invisible when you do a good job, very visible when you mess up, everyone thinks they can do a better job than you (and the only thing that convinces them otherwise is trying it (and nearly all will never try)), and there are no shortcuts. That's it.

AND ANOTHER THING while I think about it, on the subject of the Decline phase of a community website's lifecycle, which can be characterized as either Sustainable Cosiness or Tragic Heartbreak depending on whether or not the people who are there actually want to be there:

If you're ever on a website and you find yourself thinking "Man, this website's culture is super toxic, I'd better increase my involvement so as to provide a good example and thereby improve it," then CHRIST JUST RUN

Like I applaud your motivations but RUN

RUN RUN RUN

THIS IS WHY HALF THE PEOPLE ON REDDIT ARE STILL ON REDDIT

"I'll upvote the good stuff and downvote the bad stuff because this is an Important Website and there should be good people on it so that when the media runs a -" RUUUUUUNNNNNN

"If I leave, then there'll be one less good person on the site, and sooner or later it'll just become -" IT'S TOO LATE ALREADY RUNNNNNN

THE MONSTER IS BEHIND YOU AND IT'S GOT YOUR ANKLES!

More on community management and banning people? Sure yeah more on community management and banning people.

Ban the nazis? Sure! That's easy. No, really, it's easy - only websites run by really rich and often evil people claim to find it hard, and that's because they just don't actually WANT to, even though hosting nazis costs them money and goodwill.

It's incredibly easy to ban nazis, which is why nazis aren't high up on the list of worries for the typical online community.